There are not many gay and brown folks in food. But hey, we can cook too: Nik Sharma

Highlights

Mumbai-born Nik Sharma may have started his culinary journey with a disastrous combination of rice and Rooh Afza but that didn’t stop the microbiologist from experiments in the kitchen.

Nik's debut cookbook Seasons: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food, which has won praise from none other than Nigella Lawson, is a nod to his Indian roots and his home in the US, with dishes like chat masala grilled pork chops and apple masala chai cake. Sonam Joshi talks to the award-winning food blogger

You went to the US to study molecular genetics. How did the shift to food happen?I got my love for cooking from my mom’s family, especially my grandmother. On holidays, each of my grandmother’s kids were tasked with bringing one dish to a family event, and sometimes, everyone got together to make sweets. As a kid, learning how to cook was fun. It is a very experimental process — that’s what drew me. Both my parents were working so I was left to my own devices. I remember putting Rooh Afza into rice thinking it’d be an interesting combination, but it was terrible.
I started cooking for myself when I moved to Cincinnati in 2002. By the time I got a job in Washington DC, I’d eaten different kinds of food. I began taking cooking more seriously and started the blog in 2011. When I moved to California, I decided to work in a kitchen and called up 12-13 pastry shops. Only one called me back. I’d go to work at the pastry shop at 4.30am, and then to my pharmaceutical job. After two weeks, I quit my job.

Did studying science influence your cooking?Science helps me to be a better cook. Even the way we write recipes or an experiment are almost identical, listing ingredients and steps to be taken in a logical flow. I find myself paying attention to things like textures, taste and aromas and I observe how food changes as it cooks or comes into contact with other ingredients.

Your mom is Goan, while your dad is north Indian. How did this early exposure to two vastly different food traditions help?My dad is from Mathura, so his cuisine was more vegetarian. I learnt the use of dairy, ingredients like heeng and that there is a sense to the way spices are approached. On my mom’s side, the food was more Portuguese-centric, with meat, vinegar and a lot of coconuts. Growing up in a household where you had these two disparate elements served on the dinner table at the same time seemed normal. I thought everybody had that. You had things that didn’t make sense together (but worked).

Your blog is called ‘A Brown Table’ and has photos featuring your brown hands. Did negative comments to your brownness shock you?My hands became a part of the photos because I like to showcase the instructional aspects of how food comes together. It was this process of cooking that I fell in love with and why I quit my job to go into food. Also, having worked in a kitchen, I noticed that people who prepared the food rarely came to the front of the restaurant. This was my way of representing them.
A couple of years after starting the blog, I started getting anonymous comments about my skin being too dark and ashy. It is one thing to be critiqued on your work, and a different matter to be judged for things out of your control. I thought I’d give up but realised that I’m really passionate about food and that it would have meant these people had won. The comments subsided eventually.

What inspired you to tweak the traditional recipes you’d grown up eating?The food I cook is from an immigrant’s perspective. I grew up in India, live in America and travel around the world. I’m trying to connect my past in India with my present in America, weaving all of that through food.

You write that “being openly gay in India was out of the question”. Was the US better?

I always knew I was gay but I couldn’t talk about it to anyone in India. America felt like a safer space. At the University of Cincinnati, I found a support group for students who were gay. That gave me the friendship that was needed. The hardest part was accepting that I was gay to myself. It took a little bit of time for my parents but they came around.

“Mine is the story of a gay immigrant, told through food”, you write. How do you view your work given the current debate on immigration?

Immigrants don’t have to cook with notions of traditional and authentic. There is no such thing as authentic food — you’re making a recipe that was handed down by someone in your family and to them by someone else. The other factor is being brown and gay —there aren’t many people in food media like me. We have to say hey, we can cook different things and we can cook them well.

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